The Really Short Poems of A.R. Ammons

by A.R. Ammons

Book Overview

Filled with sharp irony and passionate insight, the more than 100 poems in the collection span the career of one of the deans of contemporary poetry. . . . Ammons makes you laugh and forces you to... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393028704
• ISBN13: 9780393028706
• Release Date: January 1991
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 160 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.3" x 7.7"

Customer Reviews

Natural meditation and fun lyrics

There are some fun and expressive poems and lyrics here. Perhaps the ones I enjoyed best are the nature meditations, as "When the bee lands the morning glory bloom dips some and weaves". Some have the feel if not the rules of haiku. There are also more playful and bawdy poems here as in "Their sex life: One failure on Top of another" or "Coward: Bravery runs in my family". Others such as Chasm or Cleavage use the arrangement of the words on the page to complement the poetry. If you're not up for Ammon's book-length poems (e.g. Sphere or Garbage), this provides a good introduction.

A superb selection of the author's most concise works

Ammons is a poet who has excelled in free verse in both large and small doses. This collection, drawn from the briefest poems throughout his career, includes many not previously published in book form. The overall arrangement makes the book highly satisfying as a sequential experience,with each little poem part of an overall summing up; but the volume is also quite amenable to being taken up, read about in and put down at will, for those brief moments that may be gainfully filled with poetry. For those interested in nature, philosophy and ironies of life